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Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Obama was wrong about Media Moderators

In all fairness to the GOP candidates, I don't agree with Obama's analogy of comparing the Republican candidates' complaints (of media moderators’ using “gotcha" questions at debates) to dealing with the Chinese and Russian leaders.

The "tough questions" the media moderators ask should come in one-on-one interviews, on the Sunday morning shows, at press conferences, at meetings in their offices, or on the capital steps. These "gotcha" questions shouldn't be asked at presidential debates. Even Obama and Clinton had laid down ground rules during their own debates.

So Obama (as a divider-and-chief) is a hypocrite when laughing off the GOP's complaints. It wasn’t very “presidential” of him to weigh in on the top topic. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that Obama would have criticized a Democratic primary debate if only Hillary were being asked the “tough” questions by media moderators while Bernie got a full pass.

These "gotcha" questions does us no good when we're trying to compare candidates on the issues, when the media is very obviously just trying to create contention and drama to drive their ad ratings. And in case you haven't noticed, candidates on both sides of the aisle were asked these "gotcha" questions — but most notably, far less that the media's preferred candidates (Sanders and Trump got the roughest treatment: Bernie was red-baited on the “liberal” CNN and The Donald was ambushed on misogyny on the “conservative" Fox News.)

As an aside: When Bernie said “enough about those damn emails” (when Hillary was asked a “gotcha” question by Anderson Cooper), Bernie wasn’t defending Hillary for using a private email server. He was complaining that the media had spent too much time on the subject of Hillary’s emails, and not enough time on the real issues facing us. Instead, Cooper should have asked Hillary what she thought of Bernie Sanders’ plan to expand Social Security. But he didn’t ...
he changed the
subject

Should Hillary Clinton be indicted by Donald Trump's new AG?

Blogster-at-Large

Bud Meyers writes about the economy, politics, Social Security, corporate outsourcing, labor statistics, the REAL unemployment rate, taxes and tax evasion, government and corporate corruption, and the plight of the long-term unemployed.